Bollywood Journal: Rare Bollywood Showcards Top the Bill in Toronto

One of the vintage Bollywood showcards in the exhibition at the Royal Ontario Museum.

A collection of rare vintage Bollywood showcards is taking top billing at one of Toronto's biggest museums. "Bollywood Cinema Showcards: Indian Film Art from the 1950s to the 1980s" -- running June 11 through Oct. 2 at the Royal Ontario Museum--exhibits these evocative artworks that blend Indian film promotion and embellished photography.

Unlike the commonplace posters, giant cut-out figures of actors and roadside billboards, the rarer showcards were individually produced by artists who created a collage of photographs—generally stills from the film they advertised—and painted on details, embellishments, backgrounds, lettering and other graphic elements. Several cards were made for a single movie and displayed in cinema lobbies or entryways to promote the film to movie-goers. But they disappeared in the 1980s as poster printing and other methods of enlarging images and artwork became more affordable.

Royal Ontario Museum Curator Deepali Dewan, an art historian, explains that the ongoing showcard exhibit became a possibility only after a lucky concurrence of several critical factors—the kind of amazing coincidence Bollywood screenwriters love. Ms. Dewan was already working on an exhibit called "Embellished Reality: Indian Painted Photographs," which showcased the way that Indian artists have, since at least the 1860s, used traditional painting techniques to embellish photographs. Their unique hybrid art form uses color and detail to add emotion or meaning to images.

At the same time, the province of Ontario was gearing up for a major Indian cultural event: Toronto was named the host of the 2011 International Indian Film Academy awards, the first North American venue in the 10-year history of the IIFAs. Ms. Dewan says the Canadian government encouraged institutions like her museum to do public programming "because that enhanced Ontario even more as a cultural destination for film. It gave us an opportunity to do things that we may not have necessarily done otherwise." It also presented a chance to offer events that would naturally fit into the excitement building around the awards show, she added.

And then, around the time the IIFAs were announced, the museum became aware of the showcards, which had been collected by a Canadian woman called Angela Hartwick on her travels in India between 2006 and 2010.

Ms. Dewan had been approached with Bollywood memorabilia before and wanted to see some of these pieces in person before agreeing to a project. She was delighted to discover that Ms. Hartwicks cards were real treasures - every one was an original work of art.

"They are far, far cooler than I had ever imagined," she says.

In addition to fitting perfectly into the Bollywood-related calendar of events planned in the Toronto area for the IIFAs, the showcards were examples of the one-of-a-kind hand-painted embellishment seen in Ms. Dewan’s planned "Painted Photographs" show. "Having the two exhibits up together would be a wonderful synergy. We had to do it," she said.

When exploring the "Bollywood Cinema Showcards" exhibit, the visitor is immediately drawn into a colorful, sumptuous world. Ms. Dewan says it was designed to evoke the art deco cinemas of Mumbai, an international style that suits the global nature of Hindi cinema.

"We think of Bollywood as such a localized phenomenon, but in fact it has been part of the global film industry from its inception. There's been a dialogue from the early part of the twentieth century in terms of theater styles, the movie-going experience, even some of the ways the films are constructed: dance numbers, the fashions that were worn, the dramatic personas. It's a comment on the nature of the film industry."

The exhibit also contains movie posters from the past two decades. Like the showcards, they generally feature many colors, indications of the film plot and famous faces of actors arranged in the expected star hierarchy. But when displayed next to the one-of-a-kind showcards, in which layers of images, colors and details have been created by hand, many of the posters appear surprisingly flat and predictable. It's hard not to feel that with the decline of the showcard, the cinema-loving public has lost some very special cultural heritage.

Moving images are another important feature of the Toronto exhibit. Ms. Hartwick created a documentary about the dealer in Mumbai's Chor Bazaar from whom she purchased much of her collection. His story of growing up loving films and salvaging what he could of related physical materials adds the voice of the movie fan to the exhibit.

Asked if "Bollywood Cinema Showcards" has been a success, Ms. Dewan reflected: "I think it has a good scholarly base. This is my way of making an intervention into the popular perception of Bollywood that pop culture is fluff, ephemeral and culturally specific. I wanted to turn all that on its head. It's global, it's serious stuff and it lasts.”

“I feel proud that we did a show that has popular appeal and a serious take on this topic. It's accessible to the audience who knows Bollywood really well, as well as to those who know nothing about it," she said.

Beth Watkins has been blogging for more than five years at Beth Loves Bollywood. She is an expert on Bollywood history and lore as well as contemporary movies and actors (that’s her on the left, with the Shah Rukh Khan action figure). You can follow Ms. Watkins on Twitter @bethlovesbolly.